(FORTUNE Magazine) – The figgy pudding is steaming on the boiler, or whatever figgy pudding is supposed to do. The goose, poor thing, has gone to that great migration in the sky, its mortal remains soon to lie burbling in the oven. The Tannenbaum stands festooned with jolly trimmings in the corner. It is Christmas Day. The house stirs and then, in a controlled paroxysm of joy and greed, the family comes tumbling in to unwrap the concrete results of America's marketing know- how. Look! There's a bracelet for Mommy and a bathrobe for Dad and a new mouse for Betty and a laser sword for Biff and even a squeeze toy for Lawrence, the schnauzer -- and there's more! Digging down to the bottom of the pile, the happy reveler rips the gift wrap off a rectangular object and finds . . . A book. Hmmm. If you give somebody a book at this time of year, it had better be a very good book. If it is not, if it is too short or too slight in some way, the person is apt to start trembling at the lip. There are too many digital, microfloppied, neo-entertainment devices around that grind coffee cybernetically, or gizmos that vertically blend previously Osterized vegetables, or Nintendo cartridges that blast Mario into places no fictional character has gone before. And here's . . . a book? Not to worry. There are lots of great books out there that anyone on your list would be proud to receive. A few suggestions: -- Instant Gratification. It's 3 a.m. The phone rings. It's not just a crisis -- it's without question the greatest and most insidious imbroglio in the history of life on this planet. No, we're not talking about bad debt left over from the 1980s that must be refinanced by the end of the quarter if anybody's to get a bonus. We're talking about aliens from outer space that the government doesn't want you to know about. Yes, for my friend Logan, who reads 28 minutes per day on the 6:19 to the suburbs, I'm getting Sidney Sheldon's latest thriller, The Doomsday Conspiracy (Morrow, $22). If you can put this light and spicy brew down once you've sipped the first couple of pages, you're a stronger man than I am, even if you're a woman. You say Werner, your accountant, relishes delicately plotted violence? Give him a copy of Dick Francis's 30th novel of equine adventure, Comeback (Putnam, $21.95). As Francis fans know, the previous 29 have all been distinguished by sassy plots, violent villains willing to do bad things to horses, for & goodness' sake, and intrepid heroes with vast know-how in their chosen fields who tend to get beaten up. This time it's Peter Darwin. He's a diplomat, the horses are being tormented at a veterinary surgery in Gloucester, and we're back on home turf, thundering round the turn! Positively ripping! For my friend Meredith in advertising, who is far too hip to buy it for herself, there is Scarlett, by Alexandra Ripley (Warner, $25). I can't read it, but I have a very short attention span. As I try to enter the lush, velveteen world of Neo-Tara, my mind enters into the kind of deep thought from which one awakens the next morning. But as a gift for its intended audience (which should include everyone except, I guess, males between the ages of 8 and 68), I can highly recommend it. The gang left indifferent by the detailed pleasures of the post-bellum Southern bourgeoisie will certainly be nailed by a nice, clean copy of You Gotta Play Hurt, by Dan Jenkins (Simon & Schuster, $22). This is the story of one crucial year in the life of a sportswriter, and it's not dull. ''Here's how I want the phony little conniving, no-talent preppiewad asshole of an editor to die: I lace his decaf with Seconal and strap him down in such a way that his head is fastened to my desk and I thump him at cheery intervals with the carriage on my Olympia standard,'' is how the author of Semi-Tough and Fast Copy begins his toasty little tale. For my mom, who remembers the 1930s, there's a brand-new compilation of the writings of the funniest person who ever came out of Columbus, Ohio, or possibly out of anywhere -- James Thurber. The book is Thurber on Crime (Mysterious Press, $18.95). In one of his most famous cartoons, the scene is a courtroom. The judge sits on high, looking dubiously at the proceedings. The witness cringes in the hot seat as a short, dumpy man who is clearly the prosecutor points accusingly at an extremely large kangaroo that he is holding by the elbow. ''Perhaps this will refresh your memory,'' he barks at the man in the dock. Every page contains nuggets of comic writing and just plain funny stuff. And finally, for seekers after pure nihilistic atavism, like my brother the grim, relentless lawyer, there is Needful Things, by Stephen King (Viking, $24.95). King doesn't write horror nowadays, any more than James Cain or Thornton Wilder wrote genre pieces. He provides a look at the dank, fetid underpinnings of the American experience. In this novel the Devil makes a host of otherwise decent people do the darnedest things by playing on their native acquisitiveness, their love of things. So on Donner! On Blitzen! Santa . . . has a razor! HE'S COMING AT MY THROAT! AIEEEEE!! -- Oh, Grow Up, Will You? After glutting the pure sensationalists, you may be in need of some challenging fare for more mature minds. That's why my wife, after she gets that pair of ankle-high boots she's been hinting around for, will receive a copy of Saint Maybe, by Anne Tyler (Knopf, $22), a luminescent piece of fiction about how, in one lone, thoughtless act, a person can change the lives of those around him, irrevocably and forever. ''We've had such extraordinary troubles,'' says the protagonist's formerly happy mother at one point, ''and somehow they've turned us ordinary.'' It's a mark of Tyler's artistry that her book, in spite of this kind of insight, is also consistently funny. My sister-in-law will get Wilderness Tips, by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday, $20), a collection of elegant, witty, and devastatingly cruel short stories that take no metaphysical prisoners. In my favorite, quaintly entitled ''Hairball,'' a woman ''delivers'' (by surgical removal) a large and hirsute benign tumor that embodies all the rage and frustrated desire that an urban life on the cutting edge of what's happenin' can produce. She then has it sent, gift-wrapped and dipped in a thin layer of cocoa, to her former boss and lover -- who has just fired her. Feliz Navidad! My pals Dworkin and Brewster will receive Harlot's Ghost, by Norman Mailer (Random House, $30), and Lila, by Robert M. Pirsig (Bantam, $22.50), respectively. This should keep them both quiet for the next two months at least and earn me mucho Brownie points as a generous fellow who in no way underestimates his friends' brainpower. A lot has been written deriding Mailer for the length of his new novel, centered on the CIA, but I think that's unfair. Nobody twitted Melville for dedicating hundreds and hundreds of pages to one lousy whale. It's a big meal, granted, not chopped down into MTV-size morsels for ease of consumption. That doesn't mean it's not worth eating. And Brewster -- a guy who can go off on an epistemological discursion at the sight of a worm on the pavement -- will love chewing on Pirsig's Lila. Pirsig bent our minds in the 1970s with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and he's back in characteristic fettle as Phaedrus, raving on with passion and a kind of loopy lucidity about quality and sexuality and the female life force (Lila!) and culture and . . . er, whatever: ''As an author,'' he murmurs to himself in a typical digression, ''Phaedrus had been putting off the philosophology, partly because he didn't like it, and partly to avoid putting a philosophological cart before the philosophical horse.'' Who could argue with that? -- Taking Care of Business. Big dudes (of either gender) don't read fiction. And they emit one gigantic (albeit stifled) snore at the mandatory business books of the season. Their real interest lies in massive tomes that chronicle how powerful individuals managed the warp and weft of history. That's why, for Chet, my CEO, I have selected In Mortal Combat, an exhaustive examination of the Korean war by Pulitzer Prize winner John Toland (Morrow, $25). This was a ''war of cruelty, stupidity, error, misjudgment, racism, prejudice, and atrocities on both sides committed by people in high, middle, and low ranks,'' Toland writes, and goes about proving that contention very nicely. In the wake of the jingoistic fervor the Gulf war produced, and the remythologizing of the Vietnam war, it's helpful to see a dispassionate look at the stupidities of such conflicts, whether you call them a war or just a ''police action.'' Either way, four million people died in Korea, half of them civilians. Afterward, there were no parades. For Markowitz, our strategic planning guru, I have Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War, by yet another Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert K. Massie (Random House, $35). I dropped this one on the way into the house the other night, and now must have my flagstones repaired. Every belch and squeak that led to and took place in and around World War I on both sides of the Channel is lovingly recalled in precise and clear prose. This ought to keep the guy's mind off our underperforming loans for the next 16 weeks. For Klinger, Executive Vice President in charge of Senior Vice Presidents, I have Curt Gentry's J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (Norton, $29.95), since it's important for anyone in a large organization to see how paranoia, ruthlessness, and a willingness to do just about anything to destroy one's enemies can lead to prosperity and career advancement. Finally, for Salisbury, our dashing general counsel, I have a new biography of perhaps the most raucous, brave, and thoroughly ambivalent figure of the 19th century. In Burton: Snow Upon the Desert (John Murray, $34.95), author Frank McLynn paints a compelling picture of Sir Richard Burton, an adventurer, soldier, and scholar who brought back and translated the 1,001 Nights and the Kamasutra. Burton was also a rabid sexist, racist, and anti-Semite, as so many good Victorians were. The book is tasty and frank. ''His mistress had made her muscles prehensile to such a point that she could catch a mosquito between her toes during the throes of intercourse,'' McLynn observes at one point. So few people know this kind of thing anymore.

I've got to find a suitable offering for Grimm, our financial planner, the most intellectual of my associates and one of my very best friends. I've narrowed it down to three: conservative satirist P. J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores (Atlantic Monthly Press, $19.95), deep and sensuous reading for anyone who thinks our federal government is basically run by a bunch of geeks; Low Life, by Luc Sante (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $27.50), which shows that Old New York was every bit as pestilent, grungy, and dangerous as the one we tiptoe through today; and Edge City, by Joel Garreau (Doubleday, $22.50), a squinty-eyed look at that most modern of living enclaves -- the sprawling, exurban collection of malls, houses, and office buildings that forms the nowhere land of the title. Finally, for Lazenby, our vice president for purchasing, who smokes cigars in enclosed places and likes to tell jokes about ''gals,'' I have a copy of Women on Top, by Nancy Friday (Simon & Schuster, $22). As an antidote to the current outpouring of puritanical restraint and guilt, Friday's latest assemblage of the fantasies of a host of articulate and imaginative women makes for valuable, engaging, and -- oh, let's face it -- really hot stuff, none of which could possibly be printed in this magazine. Suffice it to say that lately many women's waking dreams have turned, appropriately, to images of dominance and control. At a minimum this book could make diehard male porkers think twice about minimizing the female in the office next door (or out in the secretaries' bay). -- Wait a Minute! What about the kids? My son, who is 5, will get Eyewitness Books: Insect (Knopf, $15.99), since his idea of happiness is a warm bug. This series (which includes editions on mammals, money, music, fish, and the skeleton, among many other subjects) is uniformly terrific: long and detailed enough to provide two or three lengthy reading sessions, pictorially rich enough to be gazed at by preliterate scientists. I'll also toss in a copy of It Was a Dark & Stormy Night, design by Keith Moseley, pictures by Linda Birkinshaw (Dial, $12.95), a clever and visually complex pop-up mystery that can be read to preschoolers and ingested independently by gifted first-graders or normal, happy 7-year-olds. Probably the best gift any of us will get, however, is the amazing Dimensional Man, by David Pelham (Summit Books, $29.95). This is a life-size, 3-D model of a man, half muscular and half skeletal, that can be hung up on the wall and taken apart by inquiring minds and hands. ''Awesome!'' my son said when it came out of its wrapper. For a printed object, that is high praise indeed. My daughter, a sophisticated 9-year-old, but not so sophisticated that she doesn't sleep with her teddy bear, will get The Wretched Stone, by Chris Van Allsburg (Houghton Mifflin, $17.95). This elegant and regally illustrated story recounts the effect a small, glowing stone has on a previously intelligent bunch of sailors. It turns them into monkeys who forget how to read, write, and tell stories. When the stone is ''unplugged'' (right, it's a symbol for the old boob tube), the sailors eventually return to normal, while maintaining an odd taste for bananas. -- And Then There's Me. This season produces the greatest opportunity of the year to buy expensive books. So first I'm going to pick me up a big fat copy of The World of Chas Addams (Knopf, $30). Before it became a marketing concept, there was a real Addams Family, and they were not cute, and when they poured hot oil on festive carolers it was for real, and it killed those carolers, and a good thing, too. You get a satisfying dose of them here. But there's more. ''Would you say Attila is doing an excellent job, a good job, a fair job, or a poor job?'' asks an early pollster of a squashed peasant on his doorstep, as a medieval landscape of warring barbarians stretches out in the background. Viewing such cartoons has helped to keep many a wavering sanity comfortably away from the brink. After forking over the third of a C-note for Addams, I'm all primed to part with twice that for Photographs 1970-1990, by Annie Leibovitz (HarperCollins, $60). With laugh-out-loud-funny pictures of Whoopie Goldberg (in a bath of milk), Sting (at least I think it's supposed to be funny), and Clint Eastwood (in bondage, and as surly as ever), this is a terrific collection by America's most accessible and inventive image maker. + And finally, when the last bit of bunting has been tucked back into the attic, when the spouse is abed and all possible moppets have been stowed away with visions of microwaved brownies dancing in their heads, I'll go up on the roof and crack my most precious treasure of the year -- Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine, by Maria Reidelbach (Little Brown, $39.95). I can't describe the kind of yuks I got from this material when I was 12. Most evocative, to me, is a 1963 parody of the old Breck shampoo ads that features a pen and ink picture of Ringo Starr over the headline, ''Make Beautiful Hair . . . Blecch.'' This may or may not be funny. But I actually remember what it was like to read that joke for the very first time. And you know what? It's still dumb. I think dumb is important at this time of year, don't you? Especially in a year like this one.